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I would haft to say go with AMD, and pick a card that has 128-bit memory bus. I have been using the AMD A6 series cpu that has a radeon hd6520G built in for a few months ( since last august), and it works great on the blob. Also, Last I looked, the amd blob actually passed more tests than nvidia's bob when using piglit opengl test suite[1]. This means that generally speaking, the amd blob tends to better match what the open source drivers are aiming for.

Comment

I'm getting sick of these type of comments. In normal practice there is three main problems with your logic and the blanket Nvidia is better than AMD issue. The whole problem can summed up as a cycle.

Lack of Independent Developers - This is probably the most crucial portion. Without developers using the drivers and hardware to create software actively prevents the bugs from being found and reported in a fashion that the engineers that creat the driver best understand. Developers tend to create the software based on how their local system responds. This means that for better or worst, if there is any major bugs within the driver, these bugs will be reflected in the software.

Lack of Software - This is inadvertently caused by the Developers, but this means that for better or worst, If the driver fails to follow specification, the software will clearly function improperly on the hardware that tends to handle the specification better. A good example of this is the Wine because of the fact that a majority of developers that work on this software all use Nvidia and nvidia's driver. This inadvertently causes the software to be tailored to the bugs that are not following spec that are found in the nvidia binary driver are actually integrated into this popular software, and thus causes this software to malfunction when used on other drivers/hardware.

Lack of Highly skilled end users - This is just a general reduction in the total number of people who file bug reports. Generally speaking the more skilled users will be able to provide a lot more details on what is going on with the system. This in turn allows the driver makers to be able to reproduce the bug using their own test systems.

It's probably hard to figure these three points out, however, These are a cycle, because developers will always target the hardware that has more users. Anyways, back to the first post's question... I would say to look at what the windows benchmarks are and decide. I would haft to say that if your looking for a good video card for under $150 USD, I would look at the following cards as long as they have at least 128-bit memory bus as a dedicated card.

AMD Radeon HD5770 to HD5870

AMD Radeon HD6570 to HD6890

AMD Radeon HD7750 ( or higher )

Nvidia Geforce GT630 ( Be careful when selecting a card with this model name, and read the specifications carefully)

Nvidia Geforce GT640 ( Or higher )

Nvidia GeForce GTX (5x0 or 6x0 lines )

Radeon HD7750/HD7770
Nvidia Geforce GT640 ( Be care, make sure you get the model with 128-

Comment

I'm getting sick of these type of comments. In normal practice there is three main problems with your logic and the blanket Nvidia is better than AMD issue. The whole problem can summed up as a cycle.

Lack of Independent Developers - This is probably the most crucial portion. Without developers using the drivers and hardware to create software actively prevents the bugs from being found and reported in a fashion that the engineers that creat the driver best understand. Developers tend to create the software based on how their local system responds. This means that for better or worst, if there is any major bugs within the driver, these bugs will be reflected in the software.

Lack of Software - This is inadvertently caused by the Developers, but this means that for better or worst, If the driver fails to follow specification, the software will clearly function improperly on the hardware that tends to handle the specification better. A good example of this is the Wine because of the fact that a majority of developers that work on this software all use Nvidia and nvidia's driver. This inadvertently causes the software to be tailored to the bugs that are not following spec that are found in the nvidia binary driver are actually integrated into this popular software, and thus causes this software to malfunction when used on other drivers/hardware.

Lack of Highly skilled end users - This is just a general reduction in the total number of people who file bug reports. Generally speaking the more skilled users will be able to provide a lot more details on what is going on with the system. This in turn allows the driver makers to be able to reproduce the bug using their own test systems.

It's probably hard to figure these three points out, however, These are a cycle, because developers will always target the hardware that has more users. Anyways, back to the first post's question... I would say to look at what the windows benchmarks are and decide. I would haft to say that if your looking for a good video card for under $150 USD, I would look at the following cards as long as they have at least 128-bit memory bus as a dedicated card.

AMD Radeon HD5770 to HD5870

AMD Radeon HD6570 to HD6890

AMD Radeon HD7750 ( or higher )

Nvidia Geforce GT630 ( Be careful when selecting a card with this model name, and read the specifications carefully)

Nvidia Geforce GT640 ( Or higher )

Nvidia GeForce GTX (5x0 or 6x0 lines )

Radeon HD7750/HD7770
Nvidia Geforce GT640 ( Be care, make sure you get the model with 128-

Good advice, but what you responded to wasn't worthy of such a detailed and reasonable response since it was just an unjustified fanboism.

Comment

If you want to decide whether you get new drivers first for a new kernel/xserver there is only one choice if it has to be a dedicated card (does not apply for laptops with optimus): nvidia. amd provided 2 halfbaked 12-6 beta/final drivers with xserver 1.12/kernel 3.3 support where you need a patched libpciaccess package (specific for that system) and one legcy driver, from the version number 12-5, but called 12.6 legacy without that libpciaccess bug and kernel (on 64 bit) up to 3.4. out of the box support for kernel 3.5 you only get with nvidia. xserver 1.12 (rc) support for nvidia was introduced several month ago. If you want a new nvidia kepler (gk) chip on new series 6xx, then this card must have got pci-e 3.0 support, otherwise it is still fermi (gf) based (series 4xx/5xx with dx11, pci-e 2.0).